Portable external hard drives?

[tigerthecat]

These seem to be a better solution for me than a smaller pen drive: I wont loose it so easily and they have more storage. I have looked at some on ebay and the ads say I should buy one with a fan. What are your opinions on these drives? I want to carry around lots of information and use on different pcs. Thank-you in advance :-)

[vehelpfulguy]

How much information do you want to store ?

Remember a USB pen drive has no moving parts so can be moved around with less chance of damage.

A hard drive has moving parts and is still a fairly delicate device so has more chance of being damaged if dropped or knocked.

I believe you can get USB pen drives up to 1Gb (maybe more) so maybe a few of them would be better ?

[fo3nix]

I agree with what vehelpfulguy's said. You can also get them up to 2GB in size, in fact. If you need more than this to use on lots of different computers, i'd question why you need so much data all the time.

[tigerthecat]

Thing is I work in lots of different settings and the resources I need are quite big so I thought a portable hard drive would be better. But I take your points and will have a look at pen drives. :-)

[Space]

Beware, flash drives ( "USB pen drives" ) are much slower than portable hard drives.
Also, I would definately recommend NOT following vehelpfulguy's advice regarding buying several flash drives. If you have 2 of them, it's a real pain to have to separate your data into 2 drives. You will waste a lot of time rearranging and moving the data from one to the other just so that it all fits in.
So if you go for a flash drive, get 1 big one rather than several small ones. ( it works out cheaper too ). I think you can find 4 GB ones.

Hard drives are not that delicate. I have carried hard drives every day for years and never damaged them that way.
And they never had any fan.

In case you're wondering, I'm using a standard IDE hard drive, in an USB enclosure.
It is much more cumbersome than a flash drive, but it's fast and I never run out of space.

[fo3nix]

I don't find USB2 flash drives much slower than USB2 portable hard drives.

Yes, I'd agree to not go for several flash drives. If you can fit the stuff you need on one, then get one. If you really are going to need more, get more.

Many portable hard drives now don't require fans as they have some other cooling method. Maxtor, LaCie and Seagate are some good brands that do complete setups, or you can just buy an enclosure with the USB connections and fit your own drive to it.

Hard drives are many times more delicate than flash drives, but you shouldn't have any problems with them as long as you're not shaking it about as you are using it.

If you can manage with a single flash drive, then go down that route. If not, then go down the portable hard drive route.

[roomby]

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